Rockstar’s duology of games that showcase the last days of the Old West have largely received praise for their storytelling and characterization, including the development of the playable protagonists - the main protagonist of Red Dead Redemption, John Marston, have a great deal in common, but players who have completed both titles can distinguish the two. Though the two men have shared experiences and similar skillsets, Arthur is a less hopeful figure, given that he left his one true love (Mary Gillis) behind to continue his life as an outlaw alongside Dutch Van Der Linde. John, conversely, married former prostitute Abigail Roberts and survived the collapse of the Van Der Linde gang to live as a family man. John connected to Dutch largely based on ideals, where Arthur's connection was purely to Dutch as a father figure. Arthur had less autonomy and could not conceive of a life without Dutch and the gang, while John was able to leave the shadow of surrogate father, at least for a little while.
[Warning: Spoilers for Red Dead Redemption and Red Dead Redemption 2 below]
Read Dead Redemption 2 is a prequel to Red Dead Redemption, primarily featuring Arthur Morgan, a loyalist of Dutch Van Der Linde through the final days of Dutch’s ostensibly high-minded outlaw gang. The dying spasms of the doomed Van Der Linde gang in RDR2 are drawn out excruciatingly, rather than depicting the arc of the gang's rise and fall, making the second game an overextended denouement to a story Rockstar has never properly told, only alluded to. The original Red Dead Redemption takes place some years later, and features John Marston, another former member of Dutch’s gang, hunting down his ex-partners in crime at the behest of the government. Arthur was John’s senior by ten years, born in 1863. Both Arthur and John were adopted into the Van Der Linde gang at young ages, making Dutch something of a surrogate father figure to both men.
This ten-year difference is significant in separating the two. Arthur's traumatic childhood before Dutch's gang in RDR2 is a distant memory, and he had spent more of his life following Dutch’s orders, making it harder for him to imagine a life apart from Dutch. He was also present for more of the period that was, bizarrely, only alluded to in the Red Dead Redemption games, when the Van Der Linde gang was an outlaw group with a mission that was bigger than themselves. The gang acted as Robin Hood figures early on, robbing the rich and redistributing the wealth to those in need. John was also a member of the gang at the time of their first major bank robbery, after which they gave the bulk of the stolen gold to the poor and destitute, but in the years that followed the gang shifted from altruism to survival, abandoning much of their idealism.
RDR's John and RDR2's Arthur Have Different Degrees Of Loyalty To Dutch
Arthur’s added decade with the “Old Dutch," the idealistic glory days of Dutch never depicted in RDR or its sequel game, shapes a major difference between him and John. John is quicker to recognize that the gang has slipped away from their mission of changing the world, having become a group of killers and thieves like any other. For Arthur, the change in the gang’s activities is less relevant. John notes the gang’s loss of ideals, but for Arthur, the gang itself is the ideal. They are his family, his purpose, regardless of whether their actions follow a code or improve the lives of others. Arthur is willing to rob and murder, willing to swindle innocent people alongside Leopold Strauss, without raising objection to how these actions are further away from the purported mission statement the gang started with.
Though Arthur Morgan is better than Rockstar's GTA protagonists in of characterization, he lacks agency in his own life. The degree of autonomy the protagonists show from Dutch is a major distinction between the two, as is their willingness to prioritize Dutch’s desires over their own. Arthur was in love, at one time, with a woman named Mary Linton. Mary’s father did not approve of Arthur as a potential husband for his daughter due to Arthur’s criminal lifestyle. Arthur chose the gang over his own happiness and parted ways with Mary, who went on to marry another man. John became romantically linked with Abigail Roberts, a prostitute who was a member of the gang. She became pregnant with his son Jack, who was literally born into the gang, unlike the other who were “adopted” by Dutch. John had doubts as to whether he was the boy’s biological father, as well as of his own ability to be an adequate parent. John left the gang for year due to these concerns, creating a rift between him and Arthur, while also marking one of the biggest distinctions between the two men.
Players can argue over whether John or Arthur were better RDR cowboy archetypes, but John is easily the winner in matters of the heart. Arthur fell in love with an outsider, a civilian, and chose the loyalty to the gang over that love. John fell in love with an insider, a gang member. Arthur’s anger at John’s year apart from the gang comes from several levels. He saw it as John’s betrayal of Dutch, who took him in as a boy just as he did Arthur, and a betrayal of Abigail and Jack. He also saw that John had a chance to have both love (for Abigail and Jack) and loyalty (to Dutch and the gang) where Arthur had to choose between the two. John was far less dependent on Dutch than Arthur, as he was able to live life apart from the gang. Though Arthur saw John’s departure as him running away from responsibility, is it noteworthy that John was able to spend a year apart from Dutch, something Arthur was far from doing at that time.
John Is Loyal To Dutch's Ideals In RDR2, Arthur Is Loyal To Dutch As A Man
While the visuals of RDR2 were inspired by the art of the Hudson River School, the tone of the story is closer to Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch. Both Red Dead Redemption games echo the film's themes of the death of the outlaw era. Red Dead Redemption 2 shows this changed the West, as an increasingly militant government response to banditry through the employment of the Pinkerton agency makes the gang’s daring robberies and Robin Hood-style wealth redistribution increasingly difficult. John was wounded in the botched Blackwater robbery, during which Dutch killed an innocent woman. That experience was enough to make John recognize that the gang had lost its ideals and that continuing to pretend otherwise would simply lead to their deaths. The gang attempted a series of “one last score” heists, each of which Dutch claimed would fund their retirement into seclusion. John was quicker to realize the futility of this. The gang was planning robberies because it was all they knew, and because it was the only way of life that let Dutch feel truly free. John realized that continuing to fight fate would lead to their deaths, and those deaths would be meaningless, bereft of any idealism or lasting legacy.
In the epilogue sequence of Red Dead Redemption 2, the player shifts to controlling John instead of Arthur, as John builds a home and establishes a new life for his family. Arthur dies of tuberculosis in RDR2, but it seems doubtful he could have adapted to a life beyond Dutch and the gang even if disease had not taken him. It did not matter as much to Arthur when the gang’s dreams of social change became empty rhetoric, because the gang was enough for him. There were moments where Arthur saw the increasing futility of Dutch’s schemes, but like Dutch, he knew of no other way to live. John was still young enough, and independent enough, to fathom a life without Dutch, and to accept that the glory days of the Van Der Linde gang were over. Red Dead Redemption chronicled how John could not leave his past behind, and was later forced to slay his former partners, including Dutch himself. This cycle of violence continued with Jack, in Red Dead Redemption’s final playable sequence.
The series could make the tragic Jack Marston the third playable Red Dead Redemption protagonist, and all these characters can essentially be distinguished by their degree of attachment to Dutch as a father figure. Arthur recognized Dutch’s flaws as a father but could not live outside of his shadow. John considered Dutch a father as well, but he was able to set off on his own and leave him behind, until circumstances forced them to reconcile at gunpoint. Jack was born into Dutch’s gang but had John as a father. Red Dead Redemption 2's Arthur had loyalty to Dutch as a man, and the gang as a family. John’s loyalty in Red Dead Redemption was to Dutch as an idealist, and his recognition of Dutch’s repeated slips away from that idealism allowed John to emotionally distance himself, something Arthur could not do. John, therefore, saw the gang as a family united by ideals that lost their way, where to Arthur, the gang itself was the ideal. Jack may have vaguely viewed both Dutch and Arthur as uncles, extended family of a sort, but with less time spent in Dutch’s group came more autonomy. Jack, interestingly, ends up more like Arthur in the end. His mission of revenge is purely based on love and loyalty to his family, rather than any higher ideals about changing society.